Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  ‘I’m not allowing myself to take them off,’ said Norbiton. ‘I have to stay in the moment it all went wrong. When it’s time to take off these clothes, I’ll know.’

  He picked up his mobile phone from the floor and held it out to Trina, his lip wobbling slightly.

  ‘I’m getting phantom alerts,’ he said. ‘I keep looking and there’s nothing there.’

  ‘Wish I had the same problem,’ said Trina. ‘When I look, there’s too much there.’

  Norbiton nodded. ‘Too much,’ he said simply.

  ‘Norbiton,’ said Trina gently. ‘You’ve been talking a lot about something called The Field.’

  ‘Too much,’ Norbiton said again.

  ‘You’ve been talking too much?’

  ‘It’s too much.’

  ‘Too much to talk about?’

  He shook his head. ‘Too much to know,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said hopelessly.

  Jess could feel the disappointment in the air. Trina slumped a little, almost imperceptibly, but then, clearly aware of the signals she was sending Norbiton, reset herself.

  ‘What do you know?’ she said.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Norbiton. ‘Accentuate the positive. Don’t dwell on a worker’s inabilities; emphasise their abilities. Say: We love what you’ve done with X, and then follow it up with: Maybe you could take what you achieved with X and apply it to Y.

  ‘Norbiton,’ said Trina, ‘were you NTK on The Field?’

  Norbiton shook his head.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Jess. ‘NTK?’

  ‘Need To Know,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘It’s how things work at The Arbor,’ said Trina.

  ‘I used to think it was paranoia,’ said Norbiton. ‘But it turned out it was part of it.’

  ‘Part of what?’ said Trina. ‘The Field?’

  Norbiton had become distracted by his dead phone, tapping at it uselessly, then wiping the screen on his grimy trousers.

  ‘Norbiton,’ said Trina.

  She looked back at Jess and Deepa, raising her eyes skywards and shaking her head slightly.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ said Deepa.

  Norbiton shrugged.

  Deepa walked over and knelt in front of Norbiton. She raised her index finger and pulled down the lower lid of her eye.

  ‘Do the whites of your eyes look like this? Like, would you say this is a normal white of the eye?’

  Norbiton squinted into Deepa’s eye.

  ‘What’s normal?’ he said.

  Deepa nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I think,’ she said. ‘And you know what else I think? I think sometimes normal’s the problem.’

  Norbiton’s eyes widened. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s what I think too. In fact, during my time at The Arbor, it was something I tried to escalate.’

  Deepa laughed knowingly. ‘How did that go?’ she said.

  Norbiton shook his head. ‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘It went terrible.’

  ‘It always goes terrible,’ said Deepa. ‘That’s the problem. Look at this.’ She unlaced her trainer, peeled off her sock, and waggled the toes in front of Norbiton’s face.

  ‘My God,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘You see what we’re dealing with here?’ said Deepa.

  Norbiton nodded seriously.

  ‘You see the extent of this thing?’ said Deepa.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I really do.’

  ‘I’m not like the others,’ said Deepa.

  ‘No,’ said Norbiton.

  Trina had stood up from the floor and come to stand beside Jess. She nudged Jess in the ribs and, when Jess looked round, widened her eyes. Jess held out her hands in a gesture she hoped came across as I know, but what can we do?

  ‘What are we talking here?’ said Deepa. ‘False flag?’

  ‘I wish,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘Wow,’ said Deepa.

  ‘I know,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘Do you?’ said Deepa seriously. ‘Do you really though?’

  Norbiton gestured around himself, his hand coming to rest on his worn-out clothes, his drained and useless hardware. He gave Deepa a significant look.

  ‘Got you,’ said Deepa. ‘So how did we get here? That’s my question.’

  ‘That was my question,’ said Norbiton. ‘And that’s how I got here.’

  Deepa nodded. ‘Too many questions.’

  ‘I thought …’ said Norbiton. ‘I thought, let’s open things up, you know?’

  ‘Talk about it.’

  ‘Right. Have a dialogue. Maybe co-operate. All this …’ He waved a hand vaguely. ‘NTK. Who knows this. Who knows that.’

  ‘You were like: be free.’

  ‘I thought: initiative, right?’ said Norbiton. ‘That’s what they always say. Get ahead. Disrupt.’

  ‘Right,’ said Deepa.

  ‘But it was backwards.’

  ‘It always is.’

  ‘NTK wasn’t the input. It wasn’t even the process. It was the output.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I know, right?’

  ‘Participation without understanding,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Without knowledge,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘There was a resistance paradigm,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Only, I didn’t know there was,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘Walled gardens within walled gardens,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Oh, the works,’ said Norbiton. ‘The co-operation instinct, iterated prisoner’s dilemmas, opt-in versus involvement, satisfaction versus engagement …’

  ‘The illusion of freedom,’ said Deepa.

  ‘What don’t you want to share?’ said Trina.

  Everyone looked at her.

  ‘Norbiton,’ she said, visibly mustering patience, ‘after you left, Bangstrom took over.’

  ‘That guy,’ said Norbiton, his face darkening.

  ‘He started going on about the MTs, talking about how maybe they’d organised, unionised, or something.’

  ‘Code brown,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘Bangstrom got het up because I’d flagged an MT on the system,’ said Trina. ‘The one I tried to tell you about. Some guy called Tayz. Usually, like, insanely productive, but suddenly idle. Still logging on, still obviously pulling traffic, but not doing anything. Just … watching. Bangstrom gave me the go-ahead to check it out but when I started digging around in his files I got locked out. Next thing I knew, I was whisked off to HR.’

  ‘You, of all people,’ said Norbiton. ‘Soaking up the wrong info stream.’

  ‘Of all people?’ said Deepa.

  ‘What?’ said Norbiton.

  ‘You said of all people. Why her of all people?’

  Norbiton looked at Trina.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Trina.

  Norbiton nodded, smiled, began his gentle humming.

  ‘What?’ said Jess.

  ‘I was part of it, wasn’t I, Norbiton?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Beatrice?’ she said, her voice suddenly sharp.

  Norbiton smiled.

  ‘Who’s Beatrice?’ said Jess.

  ‘Not who,’ said Trina. ‘What. Beatrice is the software we use to package out work to the MTs and monitor what they’re doing. It allows a degree of control but also a degree of … Well, let’s call it what it is and say manipulation.’

  ‘Opt-in,’ said Deepa. ‘Participation is voluntary.’

  ‘But gamified,’ said Trina.

  ‘Were you the only person who used Beatrice?’ said Deepa.

  ‘I designed Beatrice. I used it more than anyone, knew it better than anyone. Jesus fucking Christ, the amount of times I asked for a promotion and the amount of times they told me what I did was just HR.’

  ‘NTK,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘I couldn’t know what I knew,’ said Trina.

  ‘That’s how it works,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘Were you NTK on what I was doing, Norbiton? Because I remember in meet
ings you going on about how you weren’t NTK on anything any of us were doing, but now that seems like it was bullshit.’

  ‘Outcomes,’ said Norbiton. ‘Significance. But not details. Not process.’

  ‘So you couldn’t see what I was doing, but you could see—’

  ‘I was told to think of myself as a conduit.’

  ‘Between what and what?’ said Trina.

  ‘Between you and the higher floors.’

  ‘Me? You mean, the stuff I was doing with the MTs?’

  ‘How you were doing it. What it was doing to you.’

  ‘The effect on the overseer,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Right,’ said Norbiton.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Deepa. ‘It was for wider roll-out, right?’

  Norbiton shrugged. ‘I assumed.’

  ‘Phase one is In The Building,’ said Trina. ‘Phase two takes it Outside.’

  ‘To where?’ said Deepa.

  ‘To the community,’ said Trina. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Norbiton? That’s where it goes next?’

  Norbiton didn’t answer.

  No-one said anything. Oppressed by the overview, they sought solace in meaningless detail. Norbiton ran his thumb across the dead screen of his phone. Jess noticed a scratch on her arm, the cause of which she was at a loss to recall.

  Deepa took a breath, then stood up.

  ‘Thank you, Norbiton,’ she said.

  ‘Pleasure,’ he said.

  ‘Wait,’ said Jess. ‘Deepa, hang on. There’s still—’

  ‘There’s nothing more we need to know,’ said Deepa.

  ‘There’s loads we need to know. There’s … Trina, help me out here.’

  Trina shook her head.

  ‘Deepa’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

  She turned to Norbiton.

  ‘You going to be OK, Norbiton?’

  He shrugged, as if the concept were meaningless.

  ‘Take care, Trina,’ he said.

  They walked slowly out past the counter, Jess barely able to bite her tongue.

  ‘Hey in there,’ called Deepa in the direction of the back room. ‘We’re off.’

  Zero or One’s face appeared through the beaded curtain at the back. He tilted his head in Deepa’s direction.

  ‘Coming over tonight?’ he said.

  Jess turned to look at Deepa, who was, for the first time in all the time she’d known her, in the midst of a furious blush.

  ‘I … Tomorrow?’ she said hurriedly. ‘Probably tomorrow.’

  ‘Cool, hon,’ said Zero/One.

  They stepped out into the empty street, the door clicking shut behind them. Jess stared pointedly at Deepa, unable to entirely mask her smile.

  ‘Well, aren’t you the shady one,’ she said.

  Deepa said nothing, just turned and began walking.

  *

  Jess contained herself until they were driving, then ruptured.

  ‘OK, Deepa,’ she said. ‘What the fuck was that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything. I mean, what were you even talking about in there? We went there to get information, Deepa. Answers. Instead, we’ve got … I don’t even know what we’ve got, actually. What have we got?’

  ‘Weren’t you listening?’ said Deepa.

  ‘Of course I was listening. It’s just that I don’t have the first idea what I was listening to.’

  ‘Trina,’ said Deepa, ‘you got it, right?’

  Trina nodded. Deepa gestured towards Trina as if that were all the proof she needed. Again, Jess felt that little stab of non-belonging.

  ‘Don’t be smug,’ she said.

  Deepa rolled her eyes.

  ‘Green were leveraging their own workflow,’ she said. ‘They made people think they were working on a project when in fact they were the project.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jess, trying to keep her eyes on the road but her brain on what it was being asked to digest.

  ‘They made a system of hierarchical knowledge look like a system of networked knowledge. They wanted to know exactly how much people needed to know in order to participate.’

  ‘Within that system,’ said Trina, ‘there was another system.’

  ‘The MTs,’ said Jess.

  ‘Right,’ said Deepa. ‘And within that system, there was another test.’

  ‘Trina,’ said Jess. ‘That I at least gathered. Trina was monitoring, but also being monitored.’

  ‘The aim was wider roll-out,’ said Deepa. ‘They want to take what they’ve been doing and apply it. They’re scaling up.’

  ‘Scaling up to what though?’ said Jess.

  ‘The Larchwood,’ said Trina. ‘The engineered community. That’s where the tech’s going, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Jess.

  ‘Only, there’s a problem,’ said Trina.

  Deepa nodded, giving Jess a slightly exasperated look.

  ‘The Griefers,’ said Jess.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Deepa.

  ‘So, what?’ said Jess. ‘The Griefers are what Green think they are? They’re the workforce gone rogue? Like, they’ve figured out that they each have all these tiny bits of information, and—’

  ‘No,’ said Deepa, ‘because we know they’re not that.’

  Jess nodded. ‘Because they swallowed Jasmine.’

  ‘We fooled them,’ said Deepa. ‘Therefore we know they don’t actually have the information or the access they claim to have.’

  ‘So they’re outside the system then?’ said Jess. ‘They’re genuinely some sort of movement or resistance or whatever?’

  ‘No,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of Beatrice,’ said Trina.

  ‘Wait, let me make sure I’ve got this right. Beatrice allows you, or whoever, to manipulate a workforce, right?’

  Trina nodded.

  ‘You can adjust certain parameters.’

  ‘You can keep the system sufficiently unstable. You can introduce unpredictability.’

  ‘So that it doesn’t feel like a system,’ said Deepa.

  ‘So the question really becomes …’ said Trina.

  ‘What’s the system?’ said Jess.

  ‘And given that all the emphasis has been on keeping things small,’ said Deepa, ‘on making sure that everyone only sees their tiny little piece of what’s going on, the answer is pretty obviously to think big.’

  Outside, night had fallen. Lights had gone on in windows. The streets were quiet. Jess thought again, as she always did around this time of the evening, of the unseen changes in Edmundsbury’s environment: the altered light, the relaid roads; new sensations of speed and stasis; a creeping, circadian drift.

  ‘The town,’ she said.

  Deepa nodded.

  ‘That’s their petri dish,’ she said. ‘That’s why they’re here.’

  *

  Trina had never, she realised, cycled towards The Arbor at this late-afternoon hour. Usually by now, she would be coming away, leaving it behind her. Now that she was approaching it, she noticed for the first time the trickery of its glass. Even from here, a way down the road, she could see the offices and open-plan working areas that covered its facade. It seemed as if you could look clean through the whole building. But then you noticed that the sun was obscured behind it. Its edges were transparent, but its core remained opaque.

  She cycled slowly into the car park and locked her bike in the shelter. Inside the building, she touched through the security barrier with her pass, got in the lift, and let it carry her to floor three. Surely, she thought, there would be at least one person waiting for her. Bangstrom, perhaps, or the freakish HR twins. But when the lift gave its little chime of acknowledgement, the doors parted to reveal only the familiar, muted activity of her floor. Her desk was still there, she noted, but her No-Go room, which had been tucked against the far wall, was gone. She took this as a kind of statement – a reminder that anything she might ha
ve imagined she’d built here, anything she might have constructed around herself, was gone. She remembered Norbiton in his self-built cocoon, the ease with which the structural engineers had lifted away the flimsy panels and exposed him, crouched and vulnerable inside.

  Bream and Holt were both at their desks. Holt saw her first.

  ‘Incoming,’ he said.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Bream. ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area.’

  ‘Nice to see you too,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the deal?’ said Holt. ‘Here for the mercy shot?’ He mimed cocking a gun, pressed his fingers into the back of his head, then mimicked a facial exit wound with his free hand.

  ‘Nice,’ said Trina.

  ‘Seriously though,’ said Bream. ‘Care to share?’

  ‘I’m taking over The Arbor,’ said Trina. ‘You’re all fired.’

  ‘It was always going to happen one day,’ said Holt. ‘Equal opportunities being what it is.’

  ‘Fuck you, Holt,’ said Trina.

  ‘Hey,’ said Bream. ‘No hard feelings, OK?’

  ‘Hard feelings are the only kind I have, Bream.’

  ‘Noted. But still.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Holt.

  ‘We’re being pricks,’ said Bream. ‘But affectionately.’

  Trina held up her middle finger. ‘With love and hugs,’ she said.

  She moved down the office, hearing the sudden silence of once-rattling keyboards as she approached, followed by the renewed clacking of IMs and emails as she passed. She knocked on Bangstrom’s door.

  ‘Enter,’ said Bangstrom.

  She’d expected a committee, but Bangstrom was alone, reclining at his desk with his hands behind his head, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his top buttons casually loosened.

  ‘How have you been?’ said Bangstrom, catching her immediately off guard.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘How have you been since I saw you last? How’s your family?’

  ‘They’re OK. We’re OK.’

  ‘I’m doing the feelings bit,’ said Bangstrom. ‘How do you think it’s going?’

  ‘I think it was going well until you drew direct attention to it.’

  ‘Noted.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Trina. ‘You people.’

  ‘What people? Because let’s not get political here, Trina. One thing that will categorically not help this situation is if we start getting political.’

  ‘Interpret it how you want. Political, not political. Broadest interpretation: all you people who are not me.’